Northwest Seasonal Summer Beers
The days are long, and your choices are many
By Kendall Jones
Winter beers are more common than summer beers around the Pacific Northwest. Depleted of Vitamin D in winter, we need a lot of help making it through the long, dark months.
Summer is less of an emotional and mental challenge. Still, beer drinkers reach for beers to cool their palates during the summer months and our local brewers are happy to oblige. Northwestern summer beers are often bracing and hop-forward but are also light-bodied and thirst-quenching, lending themselves to pairing with barbequed food and long, relaxing evenings.
Here are a few of our top picks for beers specifically designed to accompany your summer fun.
Silver City Brewing Company
ZiggyZoggy Summer Lager
In 1999, Comedy Central introduced a showed called ‘The Man Show’. To be kind, it provided very little cultural value except that it helped popularize the traditional German drinking toast: “ZiggyZoggy ZiggyZoggy Hoi Hoi Hoi!”
Don Spencer, the Brewmaster at Silver City Brewing Company in Silverdale, Wash., is of German heritage, so the traditional toast was not unfamiliar to him. Last year, the brewery introduced a traditional German style Zwickelbier bearing the name ZiggyZoggy Summer Lager.
The beer is a perfect blend of character and refreshment. The honey-like malt flavor balances elegantly with an assertive hop character. In keeping with Zwickelbier tradition, this refreshing, unfiltered lager is cloudy and golden. ZiggyZoggy Summer Lager weighs in at 5.0 percent alcohol by volume.
Silver City distributes the beer throughout the greater Puget Sound area. Look for it in 22-ounce bottles at better beer retailers and on tap at your local pub.
Fremont Brewing Company
Fremont Summer Ale
The beer formerly known as Fremont Solstice Ale has a new name: Fremont Summer Ale.
Apparently a brewery in California (one with pockets deeper than Seattle’s Fremont Brewing Company) claims ownership of the term “solstice” as it applies to beer. Matt Lincecum, the owner of Fremont Brewing, was an attorney in a previous life and recognized that it would be easier to change the name than to go to war over the issue. Now he hopes nobody owns the word “summer.”
New name, same great beer.
Summer Ale is golden and crisp, with noticeable citrus notes. A bracing summer beer brewed with hop lovers in mind, the hop character will make you think of tangerines and, perhaps, grilled peaches. This is a simple beer brewed to perfection. Although not a complicated formula, it is sure to please your parched palate.
Fremont Summer Ale is available throughout Washington and Northern Idaho. Look for it on tap at the local pub or in six packs of aluminum cans at bottle shops and better beer retailers. Summer Ale weighs in at 5.2 percent alcohol by volume.
Snoqualmie Falls Brewing Company
Summer Beer
In downtown Snoqualmie, Wash., not far from the Snoqualmie Falls Brewing Company, you will find a collection of old, rusty railroad cars and locomotives. They serve to remind us of a distant time when the world moved a bit slower. Snoqualmie Falls Summer Beer is kind of like those old railcars.
The brewery describes it as a “pre-Prohibition style Pilsner.” The beer harkens back to a time when lighter-bodied beers were brewed using real, traditional ingredients and not the adjuncts and additives used by today’s super-sized breweries when producing their widely-advertised monolithic light beers.
Snoqualmie Falls Brewing calls theirs a Pilsner, which is a lager and not ale, but they brew the Summer Beer using ale yeast to help add character. It is a hybrid beer that defies traditional classification.
Summer Beer is light and effervescent like a lager but touts more body than you might expect. The addition of a small amount of flaked maize and heaping quantities of Czech hops give the beer a spicy, herbal character that finishes dry.
Summer Beer weighs in at 5.6 percent alcohol by volume. You can find it on tap at pubs around the Puget Sound area and at bottle shops and better beer retailers in 22-ounce bottles.
Ninkasi Brewing
Radiant Summer Ale
Radiant Summer Ale is a very aptly named beer. Translucent, hazy and reddish orange, perhaps the appearance, more than the flavor, suggests summer. When I pour it into a glass and hold it up to the light, I am reminded of a sunset on the Oregon coast. When it first hits your tongue, you will notice a crisp, biscuit-like flavor imparted by the malt.
Eugene’s Ninkasi Brewing has never been afraid to use lots of hops but they managed to practice a bit of restraint for this beer.
The hops provide nothing more than a refreshing bitterness as the beer lingers on your palate. In a world that is so often lacking equilibrium, Radiant Summer Ale is exceptionally well-balanced: nothing overpowers anything else. The malt is flavorful but not overly sweet. You will notice the hops, but they will not overwhelm you. Like the hammock in your backyard, this beer beckons you to slow down and take a nap.
Radiant Summer Ale is 6.0 percent alcohol by volume and can be found throughout the Pacific Northwest. Look for it on tap at your local pub or find it at the grocery store in 22-ounce bottles and 12-ounce six packs.
Deschutes Brewery
Twilight Summer Ale
Gloriously long evenings that stretch out like a lazy dog on the back porch, before effortlessly drifting into dreamy twilight and beyond are one of my favorite things about living in the Northwest.
Deschutes Brewery designed Twilight Summer Ale with that most peaceful part of the day in mind. This hazy, straw gold beer sparkles like the first star to appear in the darkling sky. The body is slight but strong enough to carry a bursting rucksack of floral hop character. There is a grassy, herbal quality to this beer that is refreshing and slightly contemplative.
You might find yourself asking, “Can Deschutes Brewery do any wrong?”
Don’t think about it too hard, though. It’s twilight and the day’s journey is done. Clocking in at 5.0 percent alcohol by volume, Twilight Summer Ale is delicious and its comparatively low alcohol content invites you to enjoy more than one. However, its best quality may be its wide availability. Like most Deschutes Brewery products, it is available just about everywhere throughout the region.
Kendall Jones is a proud native and lifelong resident of the Pacific Northwest. After spending too many years writing about computer software, he decided to pursue his true passion: writing about beer. Kendall produces beer-tasting events in the Seattle area and is recognized in the craft beer community for his work as curator of the Washington Beer Blog, a popular online source for beer news and information.
